Image Courtesy of Flickr user cogdogblog
As many of you know, here at Booz Allen, we’ve got an internal suite of social media tools available on our Intranet – hello.bah.com. While it’s garnered a lot of publicity, won awards, and really changed the way we think about virtual collaboration here, I get asked this question and others like it (e.g., why isn’t anyone asking questions? How do I get people to read the blog? Why isn’t anyone editing the wiki pages?) at least once a week.
These aren’t trivial questions – people take the time to create a blog post or add content to a wiki because of the promise of emergent collaboration. They hear stories about people getting entire white papers written by people they don’t even know because it was posted to an open wiki; they see blog posts with dozens of comments that lead to new initiatives; they read forum threads dozens of pages long with input from people across the organization and they want to realize those benefits too. Against everything they’ve learned over the years, they post some content to this open and transparent platform with the hopes that people will flock to it, adding comments, having discussions, linking to additional resources, and interacting with their information. When that collaboration and interaction doesn’t happen, they quickly get turned off and will either A) assume they did something wrong and not go back or B) believe that they’ve been sold a lot of snake oil and this social media stuff isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
As you might imagine, neither of these conclusions bode well for the long-term health of a virtual community behind the firewall. So, what do I tell these folks when they ask me why no one is reading their forum posts, commenting on their blogs, or editing their wiki pages? I start by sending them these eight bullets -
- Write interesting content. You’d be surprised at some of the mind-numbingly boring stuff government consultants blog about. Realistically, out of the 20,000+ people at the firm, how many of them are really going to be interested in your jargon and acronym-filled blog post about the latest developments in IT Service Management? Write something that more than the 20 people on your team will be interested in if you’re looking to get greater engagement.
- Email is still king. Despite all its successes to date, hello.bah.com isn’t a daily, in the workflow destination for most of our staff. They see the potential of it, and use it occasionally, but visiting the hello homepage to check out the latest blog posts and wiki changes isn’t exactly at the top of mind for most people yet. Post your blog entry, wiki content, forum thread, etc. and then send out an email with a link to it.
- Cross-promote. Include the link to your content in your team newsletters, meeting agendas/minutes, email signatures, briefings, Yammer messages, and any other communications vehicles you use. Just because you’re the boss/team lead/project manager doesn’t mean people have automatically subscribed to everything you do and are waiting with bated breath for your next post. When our senior VP started blogging internally, we sent out a mass email with each post that included a link to the post, a short blurb on what it was about, and directions for how to subscribe for future posts. We did this for the first five posts or so until people were aware that the blog was out there.
- The world doesn’t revolve around you. Don’t just post and then whine about people not commenting on your content. Ask yourself if you’ve gone out and commented on anyone else’s blogs. No? Then why are you surprised that no one is commenting on yours. Go find other posts and wiki pages related to your topic and engage there. Include links back to your content as “additional information you might find useful.”
- Give people an action. Why are you posting in the first place? Do you want to get people’s opinions on some new initiative? Do you want cross-team collaboration on a white paper? Are you asking your team if they have questions about the new reorganization? Be clear about what you want from your readers.
- Tell them what’s in it for them. Tell me what benefit I get from taking time out of my day to click over to your blog/wiki page/forum and read it. Will I get an opportunity to influence future policy? Will this be the new location where all of our meeting agendas and minutes will be kept? Is creating my profile required for my performance assessment? Will I get to get answers directly from a VP instead of some anonymous email address? Don’t just tell me that it’s there and to click the link because that’s not enough. Entice me. Whet my appetite for what I’m going to get for my time.
- Do some internal “pitching.” I’ve had colleagues reach out to me and ask me if I’d blog about their programs on my blog. People have asked me to go out to Yammer and link back to their wiki pages. I’ve received internal emails from people pitching me on their project and asking me to “get my team to engage with their content.” This isn’t because I’m some subject matter expert, it’s because I happen to have a popular internal blog and my readers and friends tend to read what I write and click over to things I link to. Find people like me and make them aware of your content and ask them to get involved. No one wants to be the first person to respond – they want to see that other people have read it and commented on it too. Aren’t you more likely to read a blog post that has 20 comments than one that has none?
- Lastly, be a community manager. When the comments on our VP’s blog all started to skew toward the “thanks for posting – great job” variety, the value of those comments went way down (our VPs don’t need any more self-esteem:). That’s when I started to post some more contradictory/controversial comments and posts. I wanted to model the behavior that people could/should take when participating in that online community. Other people needed to see how to interact in this new environment.
January 8th, 2010 at 9:58 am
I’d fully agree with “Ask yourself if you’ve gone out and commented on anyone else’s blogs. No?” – it’s the first question I always ask my students when they grumble no-one’s commented on their blogs.
From my own point of view, I tend to not worry too much about whether or not anyone’s commented – my personal approach is that the blog is 99% for me. Should anyone comment, that’s good, but I don’t expect them to.
I know I comment on others’ blogs far more than they on mine – in part that’s due to the fact that I know that comments are very important for some – hence worth my making an effort.
(but then I have problems remembering where I’ve commented if I want to see if there have been any follow ups! Delicious is useful there … as I get them all together – Granted, you’ve got an email option- but not all have!)
January 8th, 2010 at 10:28 am
Steve, an excellent, practical summary of how to get and build traction with social media. People should not underestimate the effort required in blogging and sharing knowledge successfully in a manner that generates lively constructive interaction.
It’s also useful to remember that the very act of blogging and sharing has a very personal effect on the quality of thinking and reflection of the individual. If done well, it will lead to improvements in professional performance going forward, even without any third party interaction.
The other point I find is that a blog post doesn’t have to “of the moment” to have value. Pointing people back to previous posts which are relevant and are of continued value acts as a way of building trust in it as a resource to return to on a regular basis. Keeping those posts fresh and updated also helps your own knowledge and skills consolidation.
I wrote a piece for Trainingzone on Building a Social Learning Culture. I would value your comments/thoughts.
Lars
January 8th, 2010 at 2:14 pm
Thanks Emma – it’s a really tough thing for people to get their heads wrapped around. Especially for people who don’t think they have time for blogging anyway, but do carve out some time to write their own post, and now you’re asking them to go out and write on other people’s too? This particular point hits home on our wiki as well – people are always “posting” content to the wiki, when they should be adding stuff there and working on it. People haven’t quite figured out that it’s supposed to be collaborative yet.
Agree with you on not looking at comments as the measure of success, but internally, it’s those first few comments that help make it real for people. They see that people actually care about what they have to say and are more likely to continue using it.
January 8th, 2010 at 5:09 pm
The title of this post could be the title of my online life these days! Having recently ventured into social media from a professional standpoint, I’ve had to learn patience with getting content publicized to the mainstream. I’ve also had to learn to adhere to the smartest tip you give — comment on others blogs if you want to ever expect others to bother commenting on yours.
Thanks for the useful tips!
Vanessa
January 8th, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Thanks for commenting here and I left a comment over on your blog too
Education and social media is something I’ve touched on a few times here on this blog so I’m glad that you made your way over here!
January 9th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Thanks Lars – sounds like we’re both fighting similar battles within the organization! Good post over there on your blog – left a comment there.
January 11th, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Excellent tips. But I’d add a couple of things that you didn’t mention:
1) Twitter. Working to get a quality list of people following you takes time and effort, and requires giving back as well as simply following people. (I.e., you need to tweet regularly, and tweet interesting stuff). Once you’ve started to establish such a following, and you tweet about each of your blog posts as you publish them, you’ll get a lot more people reading what you write. In my mind, Twitter beats email as an alerting mechanism, by quite a bit.
2) TIME. It takes time for this all to gel. I’ve written my “CTO/CIO Perspectives” blog for 2 1/2 years now, but it wasn’t until about the two-year mark that my readership began to really gather momentum. In other words, don’t expect it to happen immediately. What drives readership is a slowly building witches’ brew of search engine exposure, awareness within your target community, subscriptions to your feed, etc. So, patience.
January 12th, 2010 at 3:13 am
Peter – would have definitely added Twitter if I had been giving regular blogging tips, but this post was limited to internal blogging. Totally agree with your assessment of using Twitter to, as Scoble says, “pimp your blog” though!
Time and commitment, on the other hand, should have definitely been added to my post! This is an often forgotten step, especially for senior level leaders who say things like, “I don’t have the time to blog, but I’ll give it a shot” and then they don’t get any comments for the first two or three or ten posts. They have to follow the steps above, while committing to it for the long haul. That’s sometimes a tough sell – that they should take the time to blog and post their thoughts onto something where they aren’t seeing the tangible results.
January 13th, 2010 at 6:25 am
I’ve been blogging for years with 200 posts on multiple blogs, etc. Evidently, my writing style is too long-winded for others, no matter how much I comment on their blogs. But I do it anyway for multiple reasons: posterity…because I’ve got relatives who have kids who might want to know my stories…because I feel that writing offers the benefit of my observations…finally, to spiff up my own writing ability. Lately that has taken a leap because I’ve been researching how to insert “relevant” pictures into what I write. Photojournalism it seems, is a separate skill… Although I was trained as an artist, I’m now learning about that.
Helpful post though.
January 18th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
I’ve started two blogs. One I post on more frequently than the other. I have a terminal illness and I post on health care issues, what it is like to live with my illness and even throw in a little poetry now and then. I’m not that worried about traffic right now. I think it will come eventually. I see my blog as part of a larger picture. I am trying to do a body of work about me. My life is very difficult and I want to use my life and my experiences to help people while I can. I post quite a bit to other blogs and I am writing a novel. When I am gone, I will leave this “body of work” to younger people in my family who are interested and have them do what they want to with it. One thing I didn’t see mentioned for getting more traffic is linkbacks. If you link to a site with high traffic, there is a chance they may notice your article and link back to you.
I haven’t had that happen yet but I have had two smaller sites use my post and my highest number of people viewing by blog was 120 which happened a few weeks ago.
Keep blogging.
January 18th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
While linkbacks are important, I think it’s more important to just get out there and comment on other relevant blogs. Including a link is good, but only when appropriate. Otherwise, it’s like your spamming that blog with “come look at me!” links
The biggest thing is that if you want someone to comment on your blog, comment on theirs too!
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